Who this is for
You are excellent at what you do, and you charge what that is worth. The people who have worked with you know it. The trouble is everybody else.
Being excellent is one part of a business. It is not the part that gets you found, or believed, or chosen, or talked about. Nobody taught you those, because you were busy getting good at the work itself. That is the part I build.
- Your work gets booked, rather than added to a cart.
- You can name your best customer, and you would like ten more like them.
- Nobody in your business wakes up wanting to do marketing.
And who it is not for
- If you sell products online, a shop is a different job, and I am not the right person for it.
- If you want ads run and nothing else, you would be paying me for the smallest part of the problem.
- If you want a prettier website with nothing behind it, a designer will do that faster and cheaper than I will.
Why this is harder than it should be
There is a name for the trap this leaves you in. An economist won a Nobel prize for it, and he worked it out by studying used cars.
Do not take my word for any of this. Go and ask ChatGPT this:
What is Akerlof’s market for lemons, and what does it mean for a premium service business?
Here is what it will tell you.
When a buyer cannot tell a good car from a bad one, they will not pay a good car’s price. They pay the average price, because that is the safe bet. The owners of the good cars will not sell at an average price, so they leave. What is left is the duds. A dud car is what Americans call a lemon, and that is where the name comes from.
Your market has the same problem, and it is worst for the people at the top of it. Your customer cannot tell you apart from someone charging half your price and doing half the job. Not before they buy. So they hesitate, or they choose on price, and you lose work you should have won.
The way out is a signal nobody can copy
Ask the same assistant what signalling is, and you will get the other half of the answer. It came out of the same Nobel prize. Michael Spence shared it with Akerlof for working this part out.
Signalling is anything that lets a stranger judge your quality before they buy. Reviews from people like them. Work they can look at. A straight answer at nine at night. Being easy to start with, and hard to forget afterwards.
Here is the catch, and it is the whole game. Anybody can signal.
The person charging half your price and doing half the job can buy a smart website too. They can call themselves the best in town. They can put up five glowing reviews written by people who know them.
So a signal is only worth something when it would cost a worse business more than it costs you. That is the test, and almost nothing passes it. Saying you have twenty years of experience is free, so it proves nothing. A hundred reviews with real names on them, gathered over years, is not free. A client letting you publish their real numbers is not free. Doing the work before anyone has paid you is not free at all.
That last one is mine. I build the thing before you pay me anything, and the monthly fee stops if the lift does not show up. It would be a foolish way to run a business if I were not good at this.
Where I come in
I want to work with people who are excellent at what they do, and who want to keep their attention there. You stay on the work. I take distribution off your desk, and I build you the signals a worse business cannot copy.
That is a standing job, not a project. Signals go stale. Reviews stop arriving. A page that was true last year is not true now. Someone has to keep it all working, and that is what you are paying me for.
It starts with your business, not a template. The free assessment scores your own version of my model of distribution, and shows where a small push would make the biggest difference. Yours will not be the same as the business down the road.
If this is you